Strange coincidences
Published 4:03 pm Thursday, October 27, 2005
By By JOHN EBY / Dowagiac Daily News
Invited to Greece to discuss a screenplay with director Mike Nichols and acting couple Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson, Eugenides decided that after nine years with an epic tale of an hermaphrodite named Calliope and history spanning the destruction of Smyrna in 1922 to Detroit's 1967 race riots, he was finished and moved on, his “older, unemployed brother” said in Dowagiac Wednesday night.
The author joked that the real Jeffrey Eugenides was at a sports bar on Damon Avenue watching his White Sox in the World Series.
He even had the Performing Arts Center houselights turned up to make sure his audience was still there and had not slipped away for televised baseball.
It was so dark on stage he said he felt like he was standing on an ocean liner, “talking to the sea.”
He's less prescient about sports, as he incorrectly predicted his Sox would not sweep the Houston Astros.
Coincidentally, while he was writing a vivid description by recalling from memory a photo of his grandparents in a scroll too brittle to be unfurled, 10 years before, his doorbell rang in Brooklyn. His mother just happened to have that picture restored and sent him a framed copy.
A second weird occurrence came at an arts colony in upstate New York when he was struggling to depict Smyrna burning in 1922 and serendipitously stumbled across a book with that very title while wandering through a “gloomy, robber-baron” mansion.
While trying to grasp Henry Ford's assembly line at the River Rouge auto plant, he phoned a friend in Southfield from New York. He couldn't reach the friend, but a woman picked up the receiver, blurted, “There's been an explosion!” and hung up.
He took his Japanese-American wife to see an endocrinologist in New York. The novelist asked so many questions related to his research that Eugenides was mistaken for a physician. Turned out he was in the office of one of the researchers responsible “for the very study I based the book on. Not only that, he went to the Dominican Republic.”
Most amazingly, he calls the love interest in Middlesex “the Obscure Object (of Desire),” a nickname for a pretty co-ed at Brown who seemed unattainable. While at a dinner on the day he finally finished his book, a woman looked familiar and it was her, though he superstitiously withheld details of the story from her until it was published.
His final “strange coincidence” involves meeting his wife.
They picked up a book about astrological compatibility and it advised that not only would his Pisces get along with her Scorpio, but she could be so supportive “she may even help him win the Pulitzer Prize.”
The Smyrna coincidence impressed upon him the need for historical research when he ventured outside his own experiences so “I was able to find the details to ground my fictional account in credibility. I hate historical novels. I don't like the fraudulent omniscience of telling you what fog looked like in 1867. I feel like I'm lying to the reader. My book is already about a hybrid creature. It began to seem to me that his story should be told by bringing two different types of narrative techniques together to hopefully create something new. I have a playful, ironic post-modern voice. At the same time, Middlesex has lots of plot. It's chockful of plot. I had a hermaphrodite with a fairly masculine voice. We are all an ‘I' before we're a ‘he' or ‘she.' Personal identity trumps sexual identity,” he decided.
Middlesex begins: ‘I was born twice,” first as a girl in Detroit in January 1960, then as a teen-age boy in an emergency room in Petoskey in August 1974.
Eugenides thinks Middlesex originated with seven years of Latin in school. He remembers Zeus arguing about whether men or women have a better time in bed and consult Tyreseus to settle the bet.
In the '80s he read the diary of a French hermaphrodite attracted to her girlfriend. Middlesex “began as a love story with two girls falling in love where one is not actually a girl. That seemed to me to be very dramatic and certainly a love story I'd never come across before. I found myself frustrated reading this memoir of a French schoolgirl because all sentences have at least two exclamation points. She's very evasive about actual anatomical details. I became quite curious and I began to think about writing my own novel, which I conceived of as a short, autobiographical memoir.”
He began research at Columbia Medical School. Literature usually depicts hermaphrodites as “mythical creatures endowed with extra-sensory perception,” Eugenides said. “It seemed to me I was going to be a Midwestern realist, so I wanted to get the facts right. What I found is that there are many different kinds of intersex conditions. The one I found most interesting you're born almost looking female. In puberty, you begin to take on male characteristics. It's a recessive genetic condition that only happens in in-bred, isolated communities. It's prevalent in Papau New Guinea, the Dominican Republic and southwestern Turkey.
He decided the book would begin with the birth of the narrator, then travel back in time to 1922 and tell of the escape of his grandparents as they left Asia Minor for America. Each grandparent carried one copy of this recessive gene. Only problem was, “I had no idea how to write this wonderful idea and my eight years of despair began.”
Eugenides said his problems were “two-fold. Technical on the one hand and philosophical on the other. The first problem any novelist has is what voice to use. First person? Omniscient third person? I wanted it to be as intimately told as possible. I wanted to be very close to this narrator, to be inside his experience. I also felt I wanted to avoid the great pronoun problem of switching genders.”
Limited by first-person narrative, Eugenides unwittingly began developing an omniscient third-person voice. Should his voice sound like a man or a woman? Do they write differently? “I didn't know the answer to that question, but I tend to think there isn't such a difference. I allowed myself to have my voice. I never felt I could write a ‘hermaphroditic voice.' Each intersexed person would have a distinct voice, as any two people would. I still knew I would have to describe his time as a teen-age girl in a way” women would accept. “There I was making a fair amount of progress,” except for his impatient editor he said he moved to Germany to avoid further calls.
Eugenides also discussed “classic post-modern” novels published in the1970s. “They wanted to show the artifice by writing about the process of writing. They have fallen into disrepute nowadays. They were written by aging academics who were having extra-marital affairs. We forget sometimes the excitement those novels had when they first came out. A lot of times experimental breakthroughs become dated. We have to remember that at the height of the Vietnam war that they had a political punch” and undermined authority.